There was nothing in the house
to speak of; nothing, to Olive's sense, but a smell of kerosene; though
she had a consciousness of sitting down somewhere--the object creaked
and rocked beneath her--and of the table at tea being covered with a
cloth stamped in bright colours.
As regards the pecuniary transaction with Selah, it was strange how she
should have seen it through the conviction that Verena would never give
up her parents. Olive was sure that she would never turn her back upon
them, would always share with them. She would have despised her had she
thought her capable of another course; yet it baffled her to understand
why, when parents were so trashy, this natural law should not be
suspended. Such a question brought her back, however, to her perpetual
enigma, the mystery she had already turned over in her mind for hours
together--the wonder of such people being Verena's progenitors at all.
She had explained it, as we explain all exceptional things, by making
the part, as the French say, of the miraculous. She had come to consider
the girl as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however
congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for
her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite
whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or
less of the inexplicable didn't matter.
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